The past truly never lets go of us. It finds a way to come back. Even in culture. Simply a matter of time really. The only difference is what goes away comes back in a shiny, new avatar.
Like the fact that these days most things in life are reinventions of the past. Take out granddad's old photos and you'll see him sporting the hottest trends on today's fashion runways. 50's is the new black. Pointed shoes, single fold drainpipes, the single inch slim tie - pretty much as the same stuff. Nothing's really changed. And yet it seems totally new in today's context.
But that's not necessarily just a fashion thing. Take a look at the 'get your life back on track' trend that goes by the name of Mindfulness - today's panacea to beating stress and other ills of a society on steroids. It's nothing more than what yogi's practiced 2000 years ago sitting on some obscure mountainside.
This takes me back to my early days in the advertising business when direct response or what we then called 1:1 marketing was the new shiny object many saw as the holy grail of marketing. It was about the right message, at right time in the right place sent to the right audience.
Circa 2017, I'm thinking all the hype surrounding what we call programmatic is nothing more than the old stuff we then called direct response advertising now neatly re-packaged. Admittedly, one can now do it real-time and make sure it pops up on every conceivable device. It doesn't need to crawl in through the mailbox.
Of course repackaging anything old must sound lot cooler, maybe even obtuse for it to create the appeal and zing needed for it to get picked up. Point is that till we don't pepper something with a fancier term it doesn't tend to get picked up. Even the buzzworthy "Native" is nothing more than what was termed as an "Advertorial" - meaning content contextually positioned in a way that it isn't interruptive as most advertising normally is.
Even the buzzworthy "Native" is nothing more than what was termed as an "Advertorial" - meaning content contextually positioned in a way that it isn't interruptive as most advertising normally is.
Point is a lot of the shiny, new digital stuff is really old, time-tested principles now resurfacing as breakthrough, disruptive thinking.
Don't get me wrong I'm not here to run down the cool stuff - after all it does help the ad frat make simple things sound a lot sexier.
Just don't ignore it thinking it's old hat not worth considering just because it happened a decade ago - because in many cases it's just fancier terms doing the rounds but pretty much the same good, old wine now in a shiny new bottle.